those you loved, but it’s time now to stop the blame.’
‘I hated her sometimes,’ she whispered, the very words so dreadful she could not give them the full power of sound.
‘Celeste?’
‘She made me stay there with her. I could have escaped, but she held me there with her weakness and her need. In the end she understood just how foolish she had been, but for a long while she revelled in it. The wine. Louis Baudoin. The danger. I could never trust that she would not be harmed by her lack of foresight and so I stayed.’
‘To protect her?’
She nodded, the brisk anger in the movement revealing. ‘And finally I could not even do that.’
‘Voltaire once wrote that “no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible”. Perhaps you should allow your cousin more of the burden of blame.’
Cassandra mulled his words over. Celeste had grown up reprimanding everyone except herself when things went wrong and in every situation had put her own needs first.
‘You think each person is accountable for their actions.’
‘I do. I am the next in line for the St Auburn title and all it entails, yet the duties that came with my job in Europe were never the ones my grandfather wished for me to entertain. It was his way of life or no way of life and he harboured a resentment I could never understand.’
‘Sometimes people disappoint you.’
He laughed. ‘I try to allow them not to.’
Lifting her head on to her hands, she looked at him. ‘Did your work in France teach you the knack of knowing what it is that others wish to hear?’
He frowned. ‘Hawk and Lucas helped me more with that. You have not met Luc Clairmont yet for he is in the Americas, but without them I wouldn’t have survived the loneliness of my childhood.’
She ran her finger across his chest, circling the skin around his nipple and liking the way it tightened. ‘I often worried that someone might come from England and arrest me after Perpignan, and in my dreams the punishment was always death. Perhaps that was a part of the reason I didn’t come home for so long. You worked for the British Service, but you never told anyone about me.’
His hand clamped down across hers. ‘I couldn’t. I never asked another question of that time because if I had found out you were dead....’
‘You kept me safe. Us safe.’
‘Then I am glad. But enough of talk, my beautiful wife, for there are still some hours before we need to rise.’
When he rolled her beneath him she simply relaxed, opening her mouth as his lips came across her own.
* * *
He heard the birdsong at dawn but remained perfectly still. Cassandra lay against him, one leg draped across his thigh and her head tucked into the crook of his arm. Her hair cascaded around them in all the shades of gold and red, wildly tangled and curling. He lifted up one tress and felt its softness.
His wife. They had slept for much longer than she could have wanted to and for that he was pleased.
No covert sneaking back home. He did not wish for only night-time trysts. He wanted to see the sunshine play across her skin and know the ecstasy of every hour of the day in bed. Not quite the slow-building friendship she had had in mind, but then nothing about their relationship had ever been ordinary. He wondered how she might explain this night away to her family.
Her breathing changed and her eyes opened, sleep filled and disorientated, but widening as they recognised daylight at the window. Yet still she made no attempt to leave.
‘You kept me up too late, sir,’ she whispered, and there was a smile in her rebuke.
‘Can I do so again tonight, Lady Lindsay? Or today if you should so will it?’
‘I cannot think your servants would be pleased at such a prospect.’ Lifting her head, she listened for a moment. ‘They are at work already, yet they have not come in?’
‘And rest assured that they will not, my love.’
Her left hand pushed back the heavy length of her hair and the ring of his mother glinted in the light.
‘However, the grapevines of those in servitude will be ringing and my name, undoubtedly, shall be bandied around the salons in shock.’
‘I’ll announce our wish to marry in The Times tomorrow and everyone in the ton will recognise you as my intended. No one then would dare to criticise.’
‘And your grandfather?’
‘Who knows? Such a pronouncement may even bring him from St Auburn as he has hoped for such an occasion for ever. Jamie’s existence will make him delirious.’
‘You almost make me believe that it could be this easy for us.’
‘Well, we have waited for years to be together again and that must be some kind of a miracle.’
She curled into him, holding tight. ‘I have missed you. Missed this. Missed talking and loving. Missed closeness.’
He felt her breath at his throat, gentle and honest. Like his life was now with her in it. He wanted to protect her for ever and love her until they were old and grey with a million memories shared between them. The harsh and raw realities of the past faded into this new serenity, Cassandra and Jamie in the very centre of a world reformed.
Her finger traced the tattoo on his forearm. ‘What does this mean?’
He smiled. ‘It’s one of the symbols from the healing temples of Asclepius. At the time, in the backstreets of Marseilles, I was looking for resurrection and renewal. Later on it always reminded me of the thin line between life and death.’
‘Being a spy must have been dangerous work. Your body is covered in scars.’
‘It’s the price one pays for not carrying arms and being out of uniform. Blending into a community is not always as easy as it might sound.’
‘But you have stopped?’
‘Almost.’
‘I am glad for it.’
‘And for the first time I think I could settle at St Auburn and run the place, farm the land, sit as a judge at the country courts, grow vegetables. All the things I once would not have seen sense in.’
She laughed.
‘With you and Jamie there it all feels possible.’
Cassie turned then to look at him, the light in her eyes bright and clear. He could never decide whether they were more green than blue. Today they seemed an exact mixture of both. ‘I think I loved you the first moment I saw you in Nay, with your dimple...here.’ She touched his cheek.
‘Show me,’ he returned and brought her against him, the sunlight from the new day creating a river of warmth on their bed.
